Is this still something Pittsburgh Police do? I called three of the zones, and they don’t seem to be familiar with bicycle registration being a thing (although it may have been in 2007 when this page was last updated).

I will note that the Pitt PD & parking office, and perhaps some of the other campuses, do still do bike registration for their students and staff. Pitt mostly comes out to register bikes at ride-to-work day, but you can actually sign up online anytime.

CMU just registers your info, while Pitt will send a sticker to attach to your beast–which came in quite handy when I lost my bike on route 79–someone recovered it and contacted Pitt; who contacted me, etc… and I recovered my partially mangled beast….he’ll be back.

Thankfully I’ve never had to use it, but I keep a few inside-my-house photos of my bike & serial# on my phone. I’ve often wondered how a cop would handle a case where a bike thief is caught, but he still claims it’s his bike. Anyone can look at the BB and write down the serial#, but how do you explain the pictures of the bike inside my dinning room?

Iguana — how did you lose your bike on 79? Did it fall off the rack of your car?

the police gave out bike licenses in the suburb of Cleveland I grew up in. I still have mine on my Miyata 512 from the mid-80s. They also would engrave your social security # on the bottom of the frame with an engraving tool. Which was handy back then, but a no-no in the identity theft new millennium.